"An Authentic Christmas for All"
The Open Door of Christmas Come and be home with God
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Text: Luke 2:1-16
Recently, I was on an elevator and found myself listening to music - often called muzak. By definition, elevator music implies background music that you never actually listen to. It's eminently forgettable; it is just there. However, a song with lyrics came on - rarely are there lyrics - and it was that popular Christmas piece:
I'll be home for Christmas,
You can count on me,
Please give me snow and mistletoe
And presents under the tree.
I wondered why that song has such a cachet and such a following. I didn't realize that originally it was written in 1943 and sung, as many of you know, by Bing Crosby to give a message of hope to those fighting overseas. It became an anthem for many of those who were at war and facing difficulty: The wish, the dream, as the song says, to be home for Christmas.
The song is by the same writer as The White Cliffs of Dover, another one of the great anthems of the Second World War, and a source of inspiration for those who heard it. I'll be Home for Christmas has been sung and recorded by many people over the years from Perry Como, to Frank Sinatra, to Reba McIntyre to my favourite rendition in 2006 by Twisted Sister. Toby Keith released a new one this month, and it is absolutely dreadful.
I'll be Home for Christmas probably reached its zenith of popularity in 1965 when the astronauts on Gemini 7, Borman and Lovell, sent a message back to Houston saying they wanted the song piped through to them. Their families were deeply touched when they heard it. Why is this song so powerful? Why did I, in an elevator, actually listen to it? Because home is a powerful concept. For most people, being home implies security, safety, warmth and love. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. One need only ask, if we could, Aqsa Parvez, whose father has been charged with her murder, to realize that home is not always a safe place. Sadly, many homes throughout the world do not live up to the ideal. But having said that, for the most part home is the place where people feel most secure. Home represents all the good and the glorious things.
Recently, an MTV-Associated Press poll asked teenagers where they feel the happiest and the most comfortable. Contrary to what a lot of people expected, 73 per cent of the teenagers said “Home.” When asked who their hero was, the person they admired the most, 49 per cent said it was their parents. Fascinatingly enough, of those teens who had a faith, 80 per cent of them said that home and their faith in God was the most important thing to them. Sometimes, I think we misunderstand teenagers, but that is another point.
Home is a powerful place of acceptance. I believe this was not lost on the writers of the New Testament, particularly Luke, as expressed in today's reading. There is this sense in both Matthew and Luke that the story of Jesus' birth says something powerful about home. Luke tells us that Jesus was not born at home. He was born in a manger, not in a stable - that is speculation - but in a manger. In the inn, where Mary went to give birth, there was no room, simply because of the census, and everyone moving in and out of Bethlehem.
There is significance to the fact that Jesus wasn't born at home. Many scholars have picked up on the parallel between the birth of Jesus and the history of Israel. The people of Israel often did not have homes. They were a wilderness people, who came often from nothing. They had to escape Egypt and live in the wilderness for 40 years like Bedouins, moving from place to place. Even when they did have their own home, their own country, they were driven out and forced into Exile. Later, they had to fight for their home and to keep their country and identity alive like the Maccabeans did.
The parallel between Jesus and the Israelites is that their real home is with God. As I have suggested the last couple of weeks, it is no coincidence that Magi and shepherds came to see Jesus in the two accounts of his birth. The story is not just about the contrast of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the sovereign powers and the ordinary powers coming to Jesus, but also about the Jew and the Gentile. The shepherds would have been Jews, but the Magi would have been Gentiles. In coming to Jesus and worshipping at this manger, the whole world was coming home. They weren't coming to a place; they were coming to God. They weren't coming to an idea; they were coming to a child.
I think the story of Christmas is pre-eminently the story of God opening a door to his home. The story of Christmas is not about humanity's search to know and understand God; it is about God's search for humanity. It was God's initiative to come in his Son. It was God's initiative to open the door to his love and his kingdom. That is why in the Gospel of John, Chapter 10, John makes the case from the stories of Jesus that Jesus sees himself as the gate or the door through which the children of God might come. He is the point of access; he is the open way for the world to come to know the Father, to know God. Jesus is the door through which people can find God.
My friends, I think this day there are many people in our world and in our community who need to find a new way, a new door to God. I can't help but think of the families of the Pickton murder victims. When I watched them light a candle in a vigil this week, and I saw the tears stream down their faces, I thought about what they went through in hearing the story of the murder of their daughters. You cannot help but think that these people need a door to walk through, a door of healing to open up, through which they can find God. In the midst of their pain and the excruciating agony of the things they have heard and seen during the trial, they need to come to a place of peace. They need to come to a manger, a place of vulnerability, where they can come home.
I think of the members of our Armed Forces who are in places of violence and in harm's way. I am sure they must be singing, as they did in 1943, I'll Be Home for Christmas, and even if they cannot, they will be in their dreams. In the midst of violence, injustice and hatred, they need an open door of peace and a manger that says, “You can come on home wherever you are.”
Those who have heard bad news about health, or will be in hospital over the Christmas period, or who are facing their first Christmas without a loved one need to be able to come to a manger and see it as the door through which they can come home to God. I think of those who are trapped in their own sin and struggling with their souls, errors in the past they don't know how to clean up, or divisions within their families. They need a place - a manger, a door - where they can come on home, and where the vulnerable Son says, “Enter. Enter here and find God.”
Christmas is about coming home and about a child leading the way. But there is also a sense in which we have to leave one home to go to another home. I have been reading the great poetry of T.S. Eliot over the last few weeks, and there is a magnificent poem titled, The Journey of the Magi. It was written in 1937, when T.S. Eliot had his great conversion to Christianity. He acknowledges that he lived a life of profligacy, paganism, and mysticism and that he followed false gods. There was a point at which he had this incredible conversion to the Christian faith. He tells of it in a poetic form as if he were one of the one of the Magi:
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
What is Eliot saying here? He is saying that when coming to Christ and finding his birth, there is a sense in which the old self dies and has “to put away his old gods” to use his phrase.
I read about a fascinating survey done by the Association of Self Storage People - something like that! I didn't know they had an association! But this is an organization throughout North America that provides self-storage units. In North America, there are 1.9 billion square feet of storage space provided in 40,000 self-storage units. The average house in 1973 in the United States was 1,660 square feet, and it is now 2,400 square feet. Yet, the average person has far more belongings to store than they have ever had and have nowhere to put them.
Where do you put all these things that you accumulate in life? It seems we have more, and more, and more, and these self-storage units are designed for us to be able to put things in places. I have nothing against self-storage, but the implication of this survey, even by someone involved in the industry, was that the vast majority of this stuff is clutter! There are things we store that we simply don't need.
I was going through my closet this week thinking about this sermon and I found that I still had a rugby shirt from when I was 15-years-old. I kept it with the vain idea that some day I would be small enough to be able to get back in it! Oh, stupid, stupid me! The stuff that we keep for no reason at all! But our clutter is not just the material things around us; our clutter can be spiritual. We sometimes hold on to things that can be offensive - avarice, pride, materialism - and so weigh us down that there is no longer room in our hearts and lives for the things that really matter.
Hilda Jarvis put it this way:
No room for the baby at Bethlehem's inn,
Only a cattle shed.
No room on this earth for the Son of God,
Nowhere to lay his head.
Only a cross did they give to our Lord,
Only a borrowed tomb.
Today He is seeking a place in your heart,
Will you say to Him: ”˜No room?'
We clutter our lives and I think there is a need to de-clutter and give room for Christ, to give room for God in our lives. Christmas and Advent are a time for us to really analyze deep down in our souls whether we have made that room for Christ. It might mean letting go of something old in order that we can experience something new.
There is one last element that I find exciting, and that is what the joy of our new home might look like. While I was in Bermuda, one of my close friends was Richard Weinacht, he was of German-Jewish descent. His father and mother were absolutely delightful with me, and as a young boy, not knowing what life was like in a Jewish home, they welcomed me with open arms. I learned and grew so much as a result of that relationship. I will never forget the first time I went to their home. I was expecting from the way he had been talking about his place, that it was a glorious mansion, a magnificent home. I remember pedalling my bicycle up to the front of his house, which had a relatively tiny façade that consisted only of a few windows and a door. I thought, “Oh, Richard has exaggerated about this house. Good heavens! What a let down this is!”
Anyway, thinking there was nothing special about all this, I knocked on the door and walked in, and then I saw something absolutely magnificent! The whole back of his house, three storeys down, was covered in windows looking out onto the ocean. In the very front of the house there was nearly nothing, but the whole house was light and there were rooms on three levels going down to a pool, right next to the ocean. It was one of the most beautiful homes I had ever seen in my life.
I think the manger is a little bit like that with God's home. I think the façade is humble, ordinary and simple. The place where Jesus had no home seems like a tiny, inferior entrance to the Kingdom of God. But once you enter it, once you open your way through it, you see the most magnificent, light-filled place, the most glorious reception, where all people are finally at home.
My friend Wolfhart Pannenberg put it beautifully in a conversation I have never forgotten. The great German theologian said:
You know, the manger is only but a crack through which we enter into the Kingdom, but through this manger, we are led to another open door. It is the open door of the empty tomb in Gethsemane. It is the empty tomb where Jesus is buried and from which he was raised. It is an empty tomb that leads us to eternity, but it begins with a manger. The door, even to eternal life, is through a child and a manger.
No one put this more beautifully than G. K. Chesterton in his magnificent poem, The House at Christmas. These three stanzas that say it all:
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the Yule tale was begun.A child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost---how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.This world is wild as an old wife's tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
This Christmas, come through the door. Come through the manger. Come and be home with God. Amen.